The Lumière brothers began producing moving pictures in the 1890s; this short of "The Serpentine Dance" required each frame of the film to be hand-colored.

Several links for this video indicate that it was produced in 1899, although the dialogue by the narrator implies a date of "1913." The dance is in the style of "Butterfly Girl" Loïe Fuller, who used billowing skirts to create a serpentine dance for the Follies-Bergere; interestingly she is reported to have used multicolored and changing lights to illuminate her skirts during the performance - the effect that this video presumably is trying to recreate.

This may actually be Loie Fuller, not just "in the style of." According to her wikipedia page, her Serpentine Dance was filmed by the Lumiere brothers around 1896. I was thinking that sure looks like Loie Fuller, although of course it's impossible to tell. Fascinating! She was an amazing woman.

@Croccydile: Unfortunately, nobody seems agree what the majority of silent films should be played back at, since there was no hard standard for several decades.

Why not play it back at whatever speed makes it look natural? No one watching it cares about fps; it's just distracting to have it play back unnaturally fast. Viewers have an intuitive sense of how things "ought" to naturally look, in terms of gravity and momentum and such, and it's the distortion of that that makes it disconcerting to watch.

I don't think it would be terribly difficult to get "close enough" to natural speed, at least so it wouldn't draw attention to itself. But then I've never tried, so maybe I'm wrong.

The reason people and vehicles seem to move more quickly in these old films is because that's actually how things moved at that time. Because of frictional resistance the rotation of the earth is slowing down, and there is even evidence that time itself is slowing down. These old films provide an invaluable resource to show what life and movement was like in olden days...

Alot of the old Edison stuff actually shot faster (30+ fps) than what is used to day (24 fps) and alot of silent films were done at 16-18. I remember reading some of the first sound+film experiments that Edison did were actually 50 (!) fps.

Unfortunately, nobody seems agree what the majority of silent films should be played back at, since there was no hard standard for several decades.

Just beautiful. MadMolecule, I believe the fast motion comes from them not shooting as many frames per second as they do today, so when it plays on a regular speed projector, it looks sped up. Shouldn't be difficult to alter that, so yeah, I don't know why nobody does.... Anybody have an answer to this?